Chapter 4: 4 | Costs Posted Later

The bills came back in the same sequence the work had gone out. The first posted at Harrow, in the eighth week, and it arrived looking like administration. A county circular, copied to the order as a courtesy, regarding the collection of crossing-duty in arrears from the hamlet of Nether Harrow, which sat below the beck's elbow and had never in living memory paid crossing-duty on anything. The duty itself was old. Some decades back a customs rider named Pott had entered the beck as the duty line for the parish, goods crossing to pay at the standing rate, and the entry had been wrong the day he made it, the beck being then a quarter mile from any road that mattered. The form had never been withdrawn, because withdrawal implies somebody reading old forms, and it had lived on in the county's books as a famous piece of nothing. Clerks trained juniors on it. Find the error in Rider Pott's Beck. There was a whole generation of the county's paper-men who had cut their teeth on that form being wrong. The elbow had moved. The line she had certified ran the water where the right had always run, and the right had always run, it now transpired, precisely where Rider Pott had put his duty line, and the form that had been wrong for decades was now, by survey, correct, and had been correct, the county's readers concluded, in the eyes of the record, all along. Nether Harrow's carts crossed the beck four times a day. The duty stood. The arrears stood with it, eight months' worth, back to the day the hatch shut and the carts began going round by the ford. Nobody at Nether Harrow blamed her. That was the worst of it. A carter she had…